Computer competition gaming between people on home personal computers or conducted across the Internet through gaming websites is a popular pastime, and includes arcade style racing games. The arcade style racing games commonly pit automotive, boat, or futuristic space ships on a cartoon looking racetrack.
Prior art for displaying racecourse related images associated with exercise equipment include Ewert (U.S. Pat. No. 6,004,243, Dynamic Real Time Exercise Video Apparatus And Method) and Studor et al., (U.S. Pat. No. 6,152,856, Real Time Simulation Using Position Sensing). Ewert teaches an apparatus and method for interactively controlling the rate of real-time video playback using a bicycle and a TV connected with a video game CD player having a pre-recorded CD. The video playback rate from the pre-recorded CD is modified by altering the duration time stamp of video frames that is determined from an external lookup table. Ewert uses separate video and data files. The external lookup table lacks global positioning system (GPS) data which otherwise would provide the users map position in a racecourse. Ewert is limited to solitary interaction with the video game CD player. Ewert lacks an input applications programming interface (API) that allows control of the application, for example speech commands and other user-insertible actions that are executed at GPS waypoints.
Studor et al. teaches the use of GPS and, like Ewert, uses separate movie files and external data tables to determine video frame rate. Though video presentation is improved over Ewert by the use of GPS data, Studor's playback videos are of lower resolution and seemingly unrealistic because it is time-based. Studor's teaching is not realistic because it lacks a distance-based method to compute video frames by defined distance increments. Accordingly, Studor does not precisely incorporate GPS data due to these time-based limitations.
There is a need for an improved virtual exercise system with realistically presented images accessed by individuals or remotely between user groups.